Author Description

Marcel Duchamp called it "the first really international colony of artists we ever had." The promise of personal freedom and self-fulfillment brought a generation of artists, writers and pleasure-seekers to the quarter-mile area on the Left Bank known as Montparnasse between 1900 and 1930. And at the center of that life was Kiki, known as the queen of the artists' quarter, who has come to symbolize everything Montparnasse had to offer. The artists, writers and composers who were there--Apollinaire, Léger, Mirò, Cocteau, Joyce, Modigliani, Brancusi Pound, Satie, Calder, Duchamp, Matisse, Hemingway, Mondrian, Man Ray, Pascin, Picasso, Soutine, Stravinsky, Stein, and countless others--created modern culture as we know it. For this book, the authors have chosen among thousands of photographs, many never before published, and interviewed artists and models who were there, to convey in photographs and text the reality and flavor of our century's greatest experiment in freedom.--From publisher description.